With the proliferation of personal electronics comes a genre of wearable personal electronics. Of interest is how wearable personal electronic devices like wrist-watch computers, earphones, video eyeglasses, and head-mounted displays, etc., can communicate with each other. Present communication schemes include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Near-Field Communications (NFC), but such over the air communication schemes require relatively large and power consuming antennas or transceivers. Body channel communication (BCC) has been proposed as an alternative, where the human body is used as a transmission medium. A connection between communicating devices can be carried out at MHz frequencies without large couplings because the signals transmit between the conductive human tissue of the body coupled transceiver and the floated ground with a capacitive return path. BCC is also defined in operating standards in relation to body area network (BAN) under IEEE 802.15. Some applications which utilizes BCC are for example in: a body sensor network, health monitoring, wearable audio devices, personal video devices, etc.
In health monitoring, one area which is eliciting interest is that of neural recording microsystems. In neural recording microsystems, it is essential to continuously acquire a neural signal at high spatial and temporal resolution with an implanted neural probe array so that brain activities can be monitored and decoded in real time. The required data rate for acquisition of an electrode probe array of around 100 channels is several tens of Mbps, in order to transmit this information from the body with high data rate wireless techniques based on ultra-wide-band (UWB) or frequency-shift-keying (FSK).
BCC supports such a neural recording microsystem application by communicating over 1-meter distance in the human body with low power consumption. However, the highest data rate among the recently developed body channel transceivers is just 10 Mbps, which is significantly less than the required data rate for the neural recording system. This is mainly due to the limitations in system architecture and available channel bandwidth.
There is as such a desire for a low power transceiver for BCC which provides for communication at a high data rate.